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nabbisen
nabbisen

Posted on • Originally published at obsd.solutions

How to change user password to the weak forcedly on OpenBSD 7.1 (not recommended)

When you try to change user password on OpenBSD and it is not strong enough, you will see the error:

$ passwd
Changing password for <youruser>.
Old password:
New password:
Please use a more complicated password.
Please use a different password. Unusual capitalization,
control characters, or digits are suggested.
New password:
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You had better follow the messages.

Please use a more complicated password.
Please use a different password. Unusual capitalization, control characters, or digits are suggested.

However, some might be sometimes unable to do it.

In such a case, what to do is to encrypt new password manually and then apply it as admin also manually.
Here is the way.

First, encrypt enables you to get new encrypted password:

$ encrypt
# enter your password
# and encrypted chars will be printed
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Then, vipw follows to update the password file. Be very careful to edit it:

$ doas vipw
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Here, search the line on <youruser> and rewrite it:

  (...)
- <youruser>:currentencryptedpassword:(...)
+ <youruser>:newencryptedpassword:(...)
  (...)
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That's it. Check if you can log in with new password:

$ su <youruser>
Password:
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